On a related note: I'd be interested in a comparison of verb tense usage. It seems to me that present tense has been getting more popular, and that I'm encountering it more in works by women than by men.
(This may be somewhat confounded by the fact that present tense is more effective in first person than it is in third.)
Yes, I was wondering that myself. There are two examples of this in the books I discuss in detail (The Hunger Games and The Girl of Fire and Thorns), both of which are YA and written by women.
I really do wonder how much of any particular writer's decision to use one POV or verb tense is a conscious choice and how much of it is because of patterns they see in their own reading.
I don't think it's controversial to say that any given literary era (and by extension, any particular subdivision of genre) has particular writing conventions. And there's a sweet spot where a book is "the same, only different": where a reader gets a buzz of something being new and exciting, without it being weird and difficult to access. POV and verb tense are factors in this as well.
>>This says to me that somehow, women are being directed to write in 1st person. Or at least that women who write in first person are more likely to have their books bought.... )
I think I have enough handfuls of salt in the post acknowledging that this is a limited sampling that is doubtless quirky to me; and further that any individual book isn't generalizable to the situation
( ... )
And I agree you acknowledged potential problems with the sample, but my caution still goes to the conclusion, because there is an implication that women are more easily led/guided than men, and also that because more women show up in the first list, there must be a problem. I don't think the data warrants either conclusion, but the conclusion could well affect people's choices.
A similar situation in hard SF--there's been so much talk about how women can't sell hard SF that an interviewer was really surprised when I said I thought the short story market actively _wanted_ hard SF by women. How many women have avoided writing these stories because they believe they can't sell them? I think we all need to write what we are moved to write, and to push on, and try new things.
I think I erred in my phrasing of the cause. It's not that I think women are led/guided (and certainly no more easily than men!) in certain directions. It's that the tendency of humans to make unconscious associations can skew one's thinking. This applies to writers, editors, readers, everyone.
So if a particular individual has a lifetime of reading hard SF by men and not much by women, that person, whether editor or writer, might have an unquestioned assumption of "women don't write hard SF"--because in that person's experience, women haven't. They might even think "women don't want to write hard SF" or "women can't write hard SF," because why wouldn't they write it if they wanted to and were able to
( ... )
Hmmm... interesting, I never thought of that. I have a 1st person POV in progress, but it cannot be written in 3rd person. Otherwise I write mostly 3rd person, but I have found myself generally gravitating towards 1st - maybe because I'm reading more and more books in 1st person? But come to think of it, right over the top of my head, I can't think of a single 1st person novel that I've read written by a man.
Editors don't give a rat's ass what POV a story is told in...as far as they know. And agents would also claim-truthfully!-that they don't give a rat's ass what gender an author is. And yet it was just a few months ago that a female writer told of how when she sent her book out under her own name she got just a few nibbles, whereas when she sent it out under a male name, she got a lot more responses.
This is how bias works. It's a thing that people aren't conscious of. Which is why I tried to stick to numbers, here, and a bit of theorizing, but very little judging. I'm pointing at a pattern and saying, "I think this is a real pattern, and I don't think it's a good one."
You can argue with whether it's a real pattern; there are plenty of weaknesses in the sampling!
You cannot argue with whether or not I personally think it's a bad or good pattern. I can love the hell out of lots of 1stP books, and still dislike what I see as a trend that I don't believe comes out of a place of pure and unskewed neutrality
( ... )
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(This may be somewhat confounded by the fact that present tense is more effective in first person than it is in third.)
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I really do wonder how much of any particular writer's decision to use one POV or verb tense is a conscious choice and how much of it is because of patterns they see in their own reading.
I don't think it's controversial to say that any given literary era (and by extension, any particular subdivision of genre) has particular writing conventions. And there's a sweet spot where a book is "the same, only different": where a reader gets a buzz of something being new and exciting, without it being weird and difficult to access. POV and verb tense are factors in this as well.
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And I agree you acknowledged potential problems with the sample, but my caution still goes to the conclusion, because there is an implication that women are more easily led/guided than men, and also that because more women show up in the first list, there must be a problem. I don't think the data warrants either conclusion, but the conclusion could well affect people's choices.
A similar situation in hard SF--there's been so much talk about how women can't sell hard SF that an interviewer was really surprised when I said I thought the short story market actively _wanted_ hard SF by women. How many women have avoided writing these stories because they believe they can't sell them? I think we all need to write what we are moved to write, and to push on, and try new things.
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So if a particular individual has a lifetime of reading hard SF by men and not much by women, that person, whether editor or writer, might have an unquestioned assumption of "women don't write hard SF"--because in that person's experience, women haven't. They might even think "women don't want to write hard SF" or "women can't write hard SF," because why wouldn't they write it if they wanted to and were able to ( ... )
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This is how bias works. It's a thing that people aren't conscious of. Which is why I tried to stick to numbers, here, and a bit of theorizing, but very little judging. I'm pointing at a pattern and saying, "I think this is a real pattern, and I don't think it's a good one."
You can argue with whether it's a real pattern; there are plenty of weaknesses in the sampling!
You cannot argue with whether or not I personally think it's a bad or good pattern. I can love the hell out of lots of 1stP books, and still dislike what I see as a trend that I don't believe comes out of a place of pure and unskewed neutrality ( ... )
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(The comment has been removed)
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